Asking for Trouble - Leslie Kelly [64]
Awful, right? Inhuman?
Maybe. But it was true. In those moments on that balcony, it had been her or Simon. And I was not the least bit sorry that Simon was the one who’d walked away. Bloody and injured…but alive.
It could have ended so differently—that’s what had me so freaked out about it, a full twenty-four hours after he’d told me the story. My brother Mark is a cop, a detective with the Chicago P.D. So I know a little something about crime and criminals and the way they operate. The whole family, including Mark’s new wife, Noelle, whom he’d married two months ago, lived in terror whenever we heard something on the news about the cops taking down a violent criminal, or interrupting a robbery or something.
I’d heard my brother talk enough to know that someone bent only on robbery wasn’t going to risk his neck if things went bad. They were usually after a quick infusion of cash for some other illegal purpose—often drugs. And they quite often bluffed about having a weapon during their holdups, since committing a crime while armed was a much more serious offense.
These two people, the sister and brother—Harrington, he’d said—had planned out their crime. They’d chosen Simon as their target, gained entrance into his room and obtained everything of value without any genuine protest from Simon. They could have gotten away without upping the ante of their crime by assaulting him.
But they hadn’t. Simon had said the man wanted to kill him and make it look like a suicide or an accident. I believed him.
Why? That was the question that wouldn’t leave my mind. Why Simon? Why try and kill him over a hundred dollars and a laptop? It just made no sense. They could have tied him up so he wouldn’t be discovered until the next morning and hit the road, never to be seen again.
It was a mystery, a puzzle. I like those, so I couldn’t let it go. Though certain Simon wouldn’t want me poking around in his troubled past, I felt the need to know more. To do my job—investigating—and see what I could come up with.
Before going back upstairs, I grabbed a box of materials I wanted to go through again. It wasn’t that heavy. Besides, hoisting it up a flight of stairs was better than having to come back down here and breathe this musty air again today.
Once upstairs, I took the box into the empty room that had once been the hotel’s restaurant. Small two- and four-person tables still dotted the place, with chairs sitting upside down on top of them. Not wanting to disturb Simon in his office, I left the box in the corner, flipped on the lights and carried my laptop over to one of the tables.
Setting up a little work station for myself, I got online and started digging around in the archives of the Charleston papers. It wasn’t hard to find the articles about the case. A Google search of Simon’s name quickly brought up pages of references on the books and articles he’d done, but in the top ten findings was a recent story about the robbery-gone-bad.
I read the article with interest, looking at the grainy mug shot of the male suspect. Interesting. He’d been charged not just with armed robbery and the attempted murder of Simon, but also with his own sister’s murder. I wasn’t sure of all the legalities, but it appeared that because she’d been his accomplice in a felony and had died while committing the crime, he was culpable for it under the felony murder laws.
“Ironic,” I whispered as I scrolled through the article.
The man was awaiting trial, having been denied bail because investigators had been unable to determine a permanent address for him and he’d been uncooperative about his background.
He and his sister—also pictured…a license photo, apparently—had not been from Charleston. They’d had ID from other states but when police had tried to track down the addresses listed, they’d found empty lots or mailbox companies.
“Why?” I whispered, more confused than I was before. If the pair